It is not certified exactly when Cristofori first built a piano. An inventory unreal by his employers, the Medici family, indicates the reality of a piano by the college year 1700; another document of doubtful authenticity indicates a date of 1698. The three Cristofori pianos that survive today date from the 1720s.
With the advent of powerful desktop computers, highly realistic sampled digital first-rate pianos have become on hand as affordable software modules. Some end multi-gigabyte piano sample sets with as many as 90 recordings, each lasting many seconds, for each of the 88 keys under divers conditions, augmented by additional samples to emulate sympathetic resonance, key release, the drop of the dampers, and simulations of piano techniques like re-pedaling.